We present Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (AnyMAL), a unified model that reasons over diverse input modality signals (i.e. text, image, video, audio, IMU motion sensor), and generates textual responses. AnyMAL inherits the powerful text-based reasoning abilities of the state-of-the-art LLMs including Llama-3 (70B), and converts modality-specific signals to the joint textual space through a pre-trained aligner module.In this paper, we provide details on the optimizations implemented to efficiently scale the training pipeline, and present a comprehensive recipe for model and training configurations. We conduct comprehensive empirical analysis comprising both human and automatic evaluations, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on various multimodal tasks compared to industry-leading models – albeit with a relatively small number of trainable parameters.

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs?To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 16 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

In dialog systems, the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component typically makes the interpretation decision (including domain, intent and slots) for an utterance before the mentioned entities are resolved. This may result in intent classification and slot tagging errors. In this work, we propose to leverage Entity Resolution (ER) features in NLU reranking and introduce a novel loss term based on ER signals to better learn model weights in the reranking framework. In addition, for a multi-domain dialog scenario, we propose a score distribution matching method to ensure scores generated by the NLU reranking models for different domains are properly calibrated. In offline experiments, we demonstrate our proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline model on both single-domain and cross-domain evaluations.

In recent years, incorporating external knowledge for response generation in open-domain conversation systems has attracted great interest. To improve the relevancy of retrieved knowledge, we propose a neural entity linking (NEL) approach. Different from formal documents, such as news, conversational utterances are informal and multi-turn, which makes it more challenging to disambiguate the entities. Therefore, we present a context-aware named entity recognition model (NER) and entity resolution (ER) model to utilize dialogue context information. We conduct NEL experiments on three open-domain conversation datasets and validate that incorporating context information improves the performance of NER and ER models. The end-to-end NEL approach outperforms the baseline by 62.8% relatively in F1 metric. Furthermore, we verify that using external knowledge based on NEL benefits the neural response generation model.

The growing popularity of Virtual Assistants poses new challenges for Entity Resolution, the task of linking mentions in text to their referent entities in a knowledge base. Specifically, in the shopping domain, customers tend to mention the entities implicitly (e.g., “organic milk”) rather than use the entity names explicitly, leading to a large number of candidate products. Meanwhile, for the same query, different customers may expect different results. For example, with “add milk to my cart”, a customer may refer to a certain product from his/her favorite brand, while some customers may want to re-order products they regularly purchase. Moreover, new customers may lack persistent shopping history, which requires us to enrich the connections between customers through products and their attributes. To address these issues, we propose a new framework that leverages personalized features to improve the accuracy of product ranking. We first build a cross-source heterogeneous knowledge graph from customer purchase history and product knowledge graph to jointly learn customer and product embeddings. After that, we incorporate product, customer, and history representations into a neural reranking model to predict which candidate is most likely to be purchased by a specific customer. Experiment results show that our model substantially improves the accuracy of the top ranked candidates by 24.6% compared to the state-of-the-art product search model.